In this essay I juxtapose a dominant culture discourse of the family, one which aims to construct an ethical center out of the marital union, with a deconstructive effort on the part of certain early Christian groups, in order to suggest that this particular Christian "antifamilial" rhetoric associated its family ethics with issues of class and social status. The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles oppose the morally inferior upper-class family, oriented around conjugal concordia, with a status-negating Christian "family" organized around apostolic potestas.